Thing of the Day
Music From The Film? What film?
February 13th 2011
Today’s thing is Music From The Film - not music from an actual film you understand, more a ‘band’ called Music From The Film…
MUSIC FROM THE FILM – How The West Was Once
(self release) – You have to like the way ‘Breaking Glass’ is on the
instrument list, kind of sets the tone. Now this is different;
different doesn’t always mean good of course, only a couple of minutes
ago we were listening to something that certainly was ‘different’,
awfully so.. This is differently good, strange sounds and rhythms that
sound so unconventional yet somehow are pulled together to form
something that resembles conventional notions on what a tune is. Who
would have thought power-tools could be so melodically soothing?
There are organically ‘conventional’ instruments here, there’s some very clever percussion, subtle rhythms that head all over the place, rhythms that make perfectly strange sense. Strange things that make the Theremin sound relatively normal, slow moving grooves and guitar sounds that might have flown from Captain Beefheart’s paintbrush. This is extremely experimental and there’s all sorts of sounds, textures and instrumentation in here but, unlike most experimental music, this makes perfectly reasonable sense, like they’ve used a whole new language to form something that in the end comes out as familiar tunes and songs... wel,l yes, weird-ass tunes and very strange songs and things that go boing and doing and twang and it does sound like Plan Nine From Outer Space aliens have descended or that maybe the BBC Radiophonic Workshop has been taken over by acid-crazed music-making fiends from the desert somewhere out near Area 51 and they’ve got Delia Derbyshire tied up in the corner while they poke at her with glockenspiels, Dulcimer sound wands, springs, banjos and brazil nut shakers (for all of those are on the instrument list alongside the cacophonator, the drill, the Tibetan singing bowl, the rubber bands and the Guinness..)
Peyote? Laughing scorpions and burning ice tea? Sightings of the
Starship Enterprise over the desert? They say they saw Kirk with a
bottle of whisky doing what? Actually things are getting a little
too deranged now - aren’t they? Are these the kind of people who you
dismiss completely when they tell you they were abducted by aliens,
that they were probed in all kinds of places, then put back down on the
street corner or the Northern Line? None of this is making any sense
now and I’m sure they did sound like regular tunes a couple of hours
ago and well, who knows who they are? Where they’re from? The press
release is obscure, the postmark on the envelope blurred, the stamp
already pulled off. They have a MySpace page but that’s equally as
vague, they have music on there but nothing anywhere near as good as
anything on this full length album. No idea who they are or where
they’re from. No sign of anything besides a yellow post-it note stuck
to the front and a hand written note saying “please consider for
airplay, G”,
We like this ‘band’:
“Regardless of what they say, we are a standard Lounge band” reads
their Facebook page… Don’t ask us, we’re just putting up the
signposts, writing the words and playing things on the radio…
www.myspace.com/musicfromthefilm
www.facebook.com/pages/MUSIC-FROM-THE-FILM/118342806126?
